Hello everyone!
I hope you’re all well.
Can you all do me a favour? If you watch any of the performances this week can you tweet about it? It brings me a lot of joy seeing people discover new things and I want to see the love!
Below is this weeks selections
free
Friday 10th June
I Wish the Earth Would Open Up and Swallow Me is an interactive performative experiment that decodes the performative potential of social media through the dramaturgy of internet platforms. Through establishing a theatrical space and time within a Facebook group as a place of a virtual community, the performance explores social media as a strategy of escape, a search for belonging and a place of active social inclusion. The performers are challenged in different internet formats through games and tasks of Instagram stories, TikTok challenges, tutorials and vlogs to represent (and embody) the position of a contemporary influencer. As part of the Facebook community, the audience actively takes part in the competition for the new ambassador position for a fictional cosmetic company LalaLush, by valuing the performers with likes and comments, thus consequently affecting the course and outcome of the game. The game that becomes more and more emotionally challenging and intimate reveals anxiety, fear and insecurity as the main collateral damage of the voidness of online representation. Furthermore, it opens up the question of how far are we willing to go in this pursuit for validation. If social media is a game that must play to exist, how can we emerge as winners?
from £3
Until Saturday 11th June
In 2016, Hannah Ballou made the first incarnation of goo:ga, a live art comedy show when she was 8 months pregnant with her first child. Five years later, Ballou is expecting her second. The biological process is the same, but everything else could not be more different; her 5-year-old wants in on the action, one co-star is in an urn, she’s haunted by the ghosts of miscarriages past, and honestly she just cannot get as worked up about kid number two. goo:ga has fun with the impossibility of re-performing old work even though you really should try to give your second child everything you gave your first. It’s a cross between Ali Wong’s Hard Knock Wife and Ursula Martinez’ A Family Outing- 20 Years On.
Science Fiction is not Pretend by RA Walden
free
available now
“Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.” N.K. Jemisin
Slow days, sick days, fog and forgetting. Disobedient bodies, archives, clocks and flows of capital. The fragility of the body is the focus of RA Walden's queer, disabled and transdisciplinary practice.
The Berlin artist radically criticises normative ideas about bodies and capacity in an ever-productive capitalist society. Their works always combine social engagement and artistic research
The video premiere “Science Fiction Is Not Pretend” shows a barrage of gloomy images of civilisation: The water is burning, the underground is shaking, animals are being turned into mincemeat. Everyday a buffet of horror, a smorgasbord of unearthly delights. Loneliness, promise, desire and fertile ground. Fallible bodies flailing under the weight of the end of the world. Complicit and raging, there is no higher ground. Sometimes there is hope, but sometimes there is only a logbook – a pathetic record keeping.
Alongside their video work, RA Walden presents an accompanying interactive website on HAU4, commissioned by HAU Hebbel am Ufer, and made in collaboration with artist Cooper Lovano. This digital environment welcomes visitors to discover references to “Science Fiction Is Not Pretend” on their own. Notes, images and sounds created in the moments between waking and sleeping. “Who is living inside you?” asks the voice in the video, with despair in one hand, the remote control in the other.
The Wet Altar by Omsk Social Club
free
available now
The Wet Altar (2021) is a tale with no end. The interactive, digital work commissioned by LAS utilizes Omsk Social Club’s ideas of parallel worlds, their signature style of Real Game Play and the fierce practice of participation as perception. The webbed narrative sits at the crossroads of sci-fi, technology, magick, and current politics. It is reminiscent of choose-your-own-adventure stories, however, the work oversteps the boundaries between fiction and reality. The words echo into the reader’s everyday life through embedded commands. Channeling the worlds of artist Leonora Carrington, philosopher Simone Weil, and author Nnedi Okorafor, The Wet Alter questions the effect of narrative on our subconscious.
The title of the artwork is based on the term 'Wetware' - which refers to the connection between the central nervous system and the human mind. 'Wetware' is often used when speaking about the unconscious in the ancient Tibetan Book of the Dead. In later years the genre of science fiction used the term to describe the concept of software and hardware that undergoes a biochemical process, linking the human brain to other artificial systems and vice versa. The Wet Altar is constructed as a stage for the unconscious to explore its own imaginative modus, complete with trap doors, loopholes and encrypted escape rooms. Each user will most likely have a completely unique experience that can last from 1 minute to 5 days. The Wet Altar is not just a fictional work, it is a potentially lived reality that can be explored in real-time and space by the user.
Thanks again for reading
See you soon
Josh x